A Memorial for a Great Piece of Fan Memorabilia

There used to exist, in our house, a pair of Buddy’s Bar glasses, products from the NBC show Friday Night Lights.

During the very frantic week of Tax Day, Passover and Easter, Squirt broke one.*

*(On a personal note, I think that this more than makes up for ME breaking the purple Fiestaware mug that Squirt insisted that we use to outfit our kitchen when we moved into our house.  She demanded Fiestaware even though I am one of the biggest klutzes in the world and have been known to break breakable objects in record time and spectacular fashion.  I broke the mug two years ago, pulling it out of the dishwasher, if you must know the whole story. She was able to get another purple Fiestaware mug BUT we cannot get another Buddy glass because NBC Universal no longer sells it.  So I think that we are now even, if not me being ahead. Now back to the post.)

We loved Friday Night Lights.  Squirt watched it first, in real time, on NBC and then On Demand.  As usual, I was behind the curve, so I watched it much later on DVD.  Squirt’s favorite complaint on the show was that it was marketed wrong.  For a casual football viewer, I initially thought the show wasn't for me.  I now know that that was/is wrong.  The show, which is about high school football, is not about football.  It IS about the life and times of the residents of Dillon, Texas and even sometimes, about the town itself.  

Also we LOVED the finale of the show, which did what few shows manage to accomplish.  It gave us time to say goodbye to the characters that we had gotten to know and love and care about.  It wasn’t too concerned about wrapping up "the story" (which it kind of did anyway) but it really let us, the viewers, leave the town of Dillon with a smile.  

But, this is not a post about Friday Night Lights.  This is a post about products for fans.

These glasses were nearly perfect as fan products because…

They represent a part of the universe of the show.  Not the show itself.  Nowhere on the glass were the words “Friday Night Lights”.  These glasses were simply Buddy’s bar glasses.  Almost as though we could have traveled to Dillon Texas, perhaps on a road-trip, had lunch at Buddy’s bar and bought the glasses home as a souvenir.  Almost as though, we could have lived, for a brief moment, in the world/town that we loved.  

But you’d have to have watched the show to know that these were fan products.  To everyone else, they were just bar glasses. Which are also useful, don’t get me wrong.

We also have shirts that tout East Dillon Lions, “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose” and the Dillon Panthers, which we wear probably more often that you would imagine.  

We do NOT have any shirts that just say “Friday Night Lights”.  

I hate fan products that are just the name of the show.  

I find it lazy.  

Too many fan products simply put the name of the show or the movie in an interesting font and slap it on everything, regardless of whether the item relates to the show at all. It also assumes fans want to shout their fandom to every passing stranger, instead of getting the thrill of the secret smile or the head nod when another fan recognizes the reference.

Because NBC no longer sells the Buddy’s bar glasses, we have moved our remaining glass to a more revered place (read: higher shelf).  

But this glass is way more to me than a piece of fan memorabilia.  To me, it is a piece of the Dillon Texas that I spent 5 seasons getting to know and love; not just a product from a show.

- Sis

Adventures in AwesomeCon 2014

As most of you know I am Fan; sometimes a fangirl, but rarely a fanatic.  In my Fandom, I decided to bite the bullet and attend AwesomeCon 2014 in DC.  I have never been really that interested in meeting the actors of the works that I love because, let’s get real, they did not CREATE them.  And I do understand that they are not their characters.  So as much as I would like to meet Zoe Washburne cuz she kicks @$$; if I get the chance to meet Gina Torres, I might pass.  Don’t get me wrong, I think think she is an amazing and talented actress and I have seen and loved her in everything she does but she is no Zoe Washburne.  

Thus, while I was excited to go to AwesomeCon, my expectations were extremely managed. I was very pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed myself and how much fun the whole experience was. 

I attended this event with two of my oldest guy friends.  You can understand that the things they were excited about varied slightly from the things I was excited about.  Because we are “adults”, and we have been friends for a long time, we compromised.  I agreed to go to the Zombie Survival and Star Wars panels with them and they reluctantly agreed to go to the “Representation is Important” panel with me.  

This "Representation is Important" panel was a discussion about how comics have a reputation for being for white guys of a certain age. And what comics creators are doing to help the increase the representation of diversity in the world of comics.  The session was moderated by Alex Simmons (@blackjackAD), who was fantastic in his own right and who I would like to just sit down and talk to for hours.  The panel consisted of the sharp witted Amy Chu (@AmyChu), soft spoken Alitha Martinez, spunky Laura Lee Gulledge (@WhoIsLauraLee) and Jeremy Whitley (@jrome58), the enlightened white male. I loved hearing the stories and experiences of people trying to bring diversity into comics. I was delighted to discover all of these wonderful new, books, authors and illustrators that I will be following for years to come. 

Later that night, over some beers before we went to go see ‘Captain America - The Winter Soldier’, the boys could not stop talking about the Representation panel.  We all had a very lively and engaging discussion, about representation and diversity in comic books, movies, TV shows and music.  I learned how they see things; I shared how I saw things.  Ideas and experiences were shared all around. 

The thing is that these are guys I have known FOR YEARS (pre-puberty even!).  They are like brothers to me and of course we share the same interests, hence attending AwesomeCon, but we had never had this discussion before or anything like it.  I got multiple thank yous for making them go to this panel. They said it was best, most engaging and enlightening panel they attended.

I also purchased Page by Paige by Laura Lee Gulledge for Sis, the introvert. She now has a graphic novel with a protagonist like her. She is really excited.  YAY! A convert! 

Squirt

Pop Culture Mementos

I was going through the bookshelf the other day and I pulled out my old tattered copy of “A Little Princess”. This was one of my favorites as a early reader and a pre-teen. I didn't even have to open the book, just viewing the fraying and torn green cover reminded me both of the story which I LOVED and my memories of reading it. I could remember how old I was was, where I read it and what the weather was like. I remembered how I cried every time, which was sometimes embarrassing if I was reading it in public. I remembered how the first time I read it, I cried so hard that my mother thought that something was very wrong, and how we laughed about it later.

Just gazing at that old book in my hands, I realized, of course, that I could read it again. And learn something new, both about the book and myself. And that is amazing! This piece of pop culture, well-entwined with my memories and my childhood, can still be accessed and consumed and it will be new and different.

And I think it is both the power to contain complex memories that are kind of meta but also to keep creating more complex memories that give pop culture mementos their power. Unlike a piece of sea glass that you pick up to remember a good day at the beach with your family or a rose pressed into a book to remind you of your first Valentine, I can go back to “A Little Princess” and have a very different interaction with the story. I might see things now from a perspective that I could not have envisioned when I read it at 12 years old. I might even fall out of love with it (unlikely), but it always offers another experience, merely with the simple opening of a book or turning of a page.

But I'll never be able to go back to that beach or back to the time before my first kiss. And that piece of sea glass will never give me any more insight on what would happen after that day on that beach. And the rose will crumble into dust, both leaving only memories. But pop culture mementos are portals to both the past and a completely different present. 

- Sis 

SURPRISE! (Or How I Learned to Love the "Gasp")

In a world (see what I did there?) of spoilers and leaks and previews and all else, it's rare these days that anything slips past those who might be looking for it. So when something is a surprise, it's a rare treat.

I remember seeing “The Avengers” in the movie theatre over July 4th weekend in 2012. The movie theatre was packed; full of Marvel comics fans and those who had been dragged with them. And I remember sitting through the movie, laughing at the jokes and cheering for the home team. But then, after the credits had rolled, there was a tag. And the audience got a glimpse of a purple-y creature berating someone for not doing their job (at least that's my memory of it). A hush fell over the audience. And then a cheer erupted.

At the time, I didn't know who that creature was; I had to have it explained to me by an enthusiastic fan with whom we ended up sharing an elevator ride to the parking garage. And even after it was explained, it didn't really mean much to me, not really being a Marvel comics superfan. But I think that the real magic of that moment was that, prior to that screening, no one in the audience knew anything about the tag.

I think that many of them suspected that there would be a tag; it has become a bit of a cinematic staple. But they didn't know the content. And in this world of midnight screenings and early previews, no one had leaked it yet. And because no one had leaked it, everyone in that audience got to experience the power of The Surprise.

Now, I will allow that spoilers have their place. I will also contend that not everything that is revealed about what happens in a movie is a spoiler. The phrase “Spoiler alert: the good guy wins” grates me like no other. Of course, the good guy wins! That is not a spoiler.

A spoiler is the oft-used “Darth Vader is Luke's father” because it revealed something unexpected in an action/hero movie. (These days it has become such a staple that the villian and the hero will have some sort of familial connection that it would be totally different if the screenwriters just wrote, “Yeah, they're not related AT ALL.”) But the familial connection in Star Wars was what is still (thank heaven) colloquially known as a twist. And for good reason.

A twist is something that causes you to “twist” the way that you've been thinking about and interacting with these characters. Going back to “The Avengers”: If for some reason you found out that Thor was the adopted son and Loki, Odin's actual child, that might twist/skew the way that you look at their world and interactions.

And because it's up to any good fan to know the full plot of every movie, TV show or televised event, we have spoilers. Which ruin twists. And that makes me mad. (Maybe even Hulk-mad.)

My issues with this practice came into focus for me after two events this past month. The first was that I was reading the third book in Sarah MacLean's Rule of Scoundrels series “No Good Duke Goes Unpunished” (which I talk a little bit about here) and there is a twist. An ingenious twist, I dare say. But what was so awesome about it was that I didn't expect it. I didn't expect the “tag” (so to speak), other than the standard epilogue that is part of any romance novel these days. But I also didn't expect the content. So I got to be genuinely surprised. And shocked. And yes, I may have even gasped.

Which was great! It was a great feeling to be surprised. I think, with regards to our entertainment media, we should all endeavor to be surprised more often.

The second thing that happened (and is still happening) is that the promotion engine for “I Frankenstein” is churning up. As a longtime fan of both the show “Chuck” and Yvonne Strahovski, I've known about this movie for awhile. But because it's a science-fiction movie and an action movie, the promotion engine is going down a path that I HATE! An exclusive scene here. An extended trailer there. And then by the time you get into the theatre, you've seen the whole movie!

And I know that there have been studies where studios have shown that spoilers don't actually keep people from going to the movie or seeing the show. I know that the pilot episode for “New Girl” was put on iTunes well before it ever aired on television and that the preview of the pilot did nothing to diminish the ratings for the show. I know all of that.

But I'm talking about me. When I go to the movies, I want to be entertained. I do not want to be marking time between revealed scenes. And if you can surprise me, so much the better.

I wait with baited breath. 

- Sis